Ryan prepares to zap market, challenge RTE with TV guide

A new TV guide - TV Now! - will be introduced next month by the publishers of VIP magazine.

The weekly publication is modelled closely on the UK title TV Quick and will combine television listings with features on soap operas and their stars, readers' true-life stories along with crosswords and puzzles.

The target market is female and with tabloid type features and a cover price of 70p it will be pitched considerably more downmarket than other Irish women's magazines.

"With the exception of Women's Way all the other Irish women's magazines have a middle-class bias," says Mr John Ryan, TV Now! publisher. "They are all going for the Foxrock set, we're not."

Whatever about the comparison with women's magazines, the real competition for this TV guide will come from the RTE Guide which with a circulation of 157,570, is still the biggest selling magazine in the State. But Mr Ryan discounts the Guide as serious competition and claims it has no focus. "One week they'll have Celine Dion on the cover, another week it'll be a film star which will have nothing whatsoever to do with that week's television," he says.

"We'll be concentrating on soap stars and we'll be entirely TV focused."

Aside from challenging the RTE title on the newsstand, Mr Ryan and his co publisher Mr Michael O'Doherty intend to bring the challenge to the courts. RTE supports its Guide with increasingly sophisticated advertising on its TV and radio stations.

This has long been a source of contention with other magazine publishers who consider it a breach of the station's public service remit and an abuse of its TV licence funded position. "The Guide simply couldn't sell in the sort of numbers it does unless it was supported by all that free advertising," claims Mr Ryan who estimates that a magazine would have to spend £30,000 (€38,119) a week to compete with the Guide's advertising.

Weekly TV listings are now a feature of most newspapers including the Sunday Times, Evening Herald and Irish In- dependent which would seem to suggest the market is already saturated. However the same situation exists in the UK where such soap focused listings magazines as TV Quick and What's on TV have been strong circulations in a stagnant magazine sector.

Low cover price weeklies with a strong tabloid influence such as Take a Break! and Bella were the publishing success stories of the 1990s and are strong sellers in Ireland where they have undermined Women's Way's circulation.